Watercolor Dirtbag
Da Vinci’s Violet Iron Oxide is a color I haven’t seen anywhere else. It’s a transparent, highly granulating, cool purple-toned maroon brown made from the PR101 pigment, the same that is used for Transparent Red Oxide and the opaque Indian Red.
When a person is into color as much as Mimi Robinson, author of Local Color, I naturally find myself asking “What paints does she have in her palette?”
In my Nature Notebook series, I take a look at natural phenomena and try to explore the science & nature facts behind them in order to improve the accuracy of my paintings. I am not a realistic painter by any means, but still, I feel like a grounding in natural reality is helpful even for … Read more
Sodalite is one of Daniel Smith’s exclusive Primatek colors made from real minerals. This one is a granulating, very dark blue. I’d say this is a good substitute for Indigo (which is traditionally blue + black) if you’re looking for something in that color family that is more granulating and/or single pigment.
A book I enjoyed recently is Local Color: Seeing Place Through Watercolor by Mimi Robinson. Wherever Mimi travels, she makes “palettes” of local color. I don’t mean palette-building the way I normally do it, where I choose paints to add to my travel palette for a particular season or trip; this is more of a … Read more
At the beginning of 2023, I posted my 2022 “sketchbook” (i.e. all my paintings of 2022, whether they were actually in a sketchbook or not). For completion’s sake, I decided to go back in time and do 2021. This is the year I started painting, so I can’t go back any further than that!
It’s a trip to look back through these two years later, because I have such specific memories associated with each one!
I previously rounded up multiple versions of muted mixed greens, so now let’s look at a few bright mixed greens!
I’m about two years late to this controversy, but I recently decided to dig into this question after a few oblique comments here and there. Oto Kano mentioned on one of their videos that they’re moving away from Daniel Smith paints because they disagree with some of the actions of the company, but did not … Read more
We’ve reached the final stretch! I’ll finish up the DV dot cards today by exploring the earth tones (DV has some of my favorites!) and neutrals like black, white, and gray. I’ll also answer the question: which Da Vinci colors are not in this dot card set?
Van Dyck Brown is a very dark, almost black brown that is rather like a blacker/grayer version of Raw Umber. Most companies make it using a combination of PBr7 (the traditional earth tone pigment that Raw and Burnt Umber are made from) plus a black. Daniel Smith’s version is made from only PBr7. Experiment Results … Read more